Reading Willy Wonka in the ERA of Anti-Thinking

Whether encountered as a movie or novel, Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a childhood staple of postwar Anglophone culture. Originally published in 1964, Dahl’s story of “Willie Wonka” is a morality tale for our times addressed by the present essay in relation to the precariousness,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The American journal of psychoanalysis 2018-06, Vol.78 (2), p.113-125
Main Author: Miller, Ian, S.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Anglophones
Behavioral Science and Psychology
Clinical Psychology
Cognition & reasoning
Intergenerational relationships
Popular culture
Psychoanalysis
Psychology
Psychotherapy
Science fiction & fantasy
Social mobility
Trauma
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Summary:Whether encountered as a movie or novel, Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a childhood staple of postwar Anglophone culture. Originally published in 1964, Dahl’s story of “Willie Wonka” is a morality tale for our times addressed by the present essay in relation to the precariousness, violence, intergenerational faith, and materialist fantasies reflective of contemporary life in the early twenty-first century. Compensating for the precarity of contemporary life’s impoverishment as assumptions of societal stability are overthrown, this chronicle of the Bucket family details: envious desire validated by large group chosen trauma; authoritarian enslavement of inferior, colonized peoples with murderous, industrial-level human experimentation; toward gratification of the greedy fantasy of unlimited sweetness under the sway of lethal identification with the aggressor.
ISSN:0002-9548
1573-6741
DOI:10.1057/s11231-018-9139-4